Can you think of anything that you would rather be doing with your life than what you are doing now? Did you somehow convince yourself that it wasn’t worth pursuing because there was no future in it?
That is process of what I like to call dream smashing. It is the process that many people go through in which they at some point in their lives decide to take a hammer to the thing they would like to do the most and smash it.
The question I believe we all need to ask ourselves is, “Why?”
An old saying I used to hear was that, “You can’t live on dreams”. That is fair enough and it does apply in some cases. I mean, if you’re so poor that you can barely feed yourself let alone your family, setting off to pursue your dream of being a professional circus clown might seem a tad irresponsible to some people.
While you may not pursue that dream right from the start, it doesn’t mean that you should let it go. For me, dreams are the fuel that give me a reason a live. They give me a reason to get up every morning and give my day’s a purpose.
I remember back when I was convinced I could never achieve my dreams and that my dreams were, and I quote “a pointless waste of time”. Daily life was a struggle between getting by with my responsibilities and trying to find meaning in things that others would have me believe are “the things that will make me happy”.
Getting advice on how to be happy from people who don’t know themselves is like asking a spammer how to start a successful internet business. You get a lot of advice but nothing particularly useful.
Over the last year of working from home, I have come to clarify some definitions with myself on what really makes me happy, and these include:
- Being comfortable with being myself
- Having the freedom to express myself in any shape or form
- Having the freedom to pursue interests
- Having the time to spend on the things I enjoy and with the people I love
- Having the freedom to be there for the people I care for
- Having friends who accept me as I am and do not judge me
- Being able to truly help people in ways that change their lives
If you’ll notice, non of these reasons include money. This doesn’t mean that I don’t think money is important. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to do many things. The point is simply not to make money the end goal.
To say that having money will make you happy is like saying having a hammer will make you happy.
It isn’t the tool itself that makes you happy (unless you have some weird carpentry fetish), it’s knowing what you can do with the tool that gives the tool its true value. Having the tool can bring you closer to realizing your dreams, but if you have no dreams to chase then the tool is worthless.
If you have a dream, something you want to do before your life is over and the only thing that is stopping you is lack of time and money, DON’T SMASH IT.
Money can be earned and time can be made as long as you have a strong enough reason to have it. Dreams can be that reason, so if your reason for wanting to escape the office is to pursue them, then hold on to that dream with everything you got.
If you liked this post and would like to receive new posts direct to your email click here.
No related posts.
Yasuo Long believes that all employees should have the right to design their lifestyle according to their needs in order to maintain their health, their relationships and their happiness. In pursuit of this, he quit the 9-to-5 and became a telecommuter to give himself the time and mental freedom to discover what it really means to live with direction and purpose.
